Starlight developed an immense face in the cryptic mists floating up the knoll. Romut dropped the langor-weed and backed away two stiff, jolting steps. He thought a bog giant had reared up from the marsh below, the features were so huge, swollen and vivid.
Then he noticed that this caricature hovered disembodied, an apparition composed of pale green swamp gas. The misshapen aspect in the blue starlight leered with menace.
"What do you want of me, phantom?" Romut challenged. "Who sent you?"
"One you know and yet know not," the spirit said as it slid closer.
"Who are you?"
"What you say."
"You are a shade," Romut declared, certain that his night vision did not deceive him. "Whose Charm sends you here?"
"The very one who calls me back—now that you have been found!" The incandescent face beswirled to molten vapors and vanished in the wind.
A shiver jumped through Romut and made his bones clop.
"What deviltry is this?" he voiced his fright aloud. "This is not ogres' work. Those brutes have no Charm at all. Then who? Who do I know and yet know not?"
No answer accompanied the flitting bats that blurred overhead. Romut stomped angrily on the fallen butt of langor-weed, wanting to believe he had suffered an arrant vision induced by rancid smoke.
"Prepare to be taken!" the specter's voice interceded, and the squat man heaved about, lurching with fright.
"Who speaks?" he cried to the clouds of stars.
Silence received into enormity the dull thunder of surf and the dim twitter of bats.
"Take me then!" Romut bawled to the night and strode down the knoll, churning with fear and undirected rage.
An apparition such as he had witnessed required more Charm than any mortal being he knew could muster.
Unless it be the wizarduke, he thought with a spasm of fright. Lord Drev had sworn to avenge the death of his sister, Lady Mevea, upon every wretched champion of the Bold Ones. Has he found me out at last?
Romut hurried through the marsh mist, so distraught that often he splashed off the trail into mud. By the time he staggered onto the quaking sand of the tidal flats with their luminous and blurred reflections of the heavens, mud plastered his leggings and gobs of mire hung like putty on his large and hideous face.
The other crew workers, humans all, peered curiously at him, but none dared query him. Though half their height, he oft asserted his rageful temper and gnomish strength. He intimidated the other scavengers, and none pitied him when the ogres flogged him with medusa cords or hung him upside down over droning, fire-poked hives.
These bitter memories scattered at the approach of the ogres, and he stood, head bowed, among the others, awaiting that night's commands.
The ogres, with their powerful bodies and small, sooty faces, strode the line of scavengers, bellowing orders. A stink like burnt vomit accompanied them. Their fleecy manes shook with the enormity of their voices: “Dig dunes! Drag foreshore! Rake shoals! Move!”
Legs thick as tree trunks sunk into the wet sand, yet they advanced with eerie agility. The massive excess of their shoulders and muscle-cumbered arms seemed to hover as though invisible wings unfolded behind them.
Unshod and naked but for shaggy kilts dark and matted with smeared gore, the ogres looked primitive, though they possessed minds even more nimble than their quick bulks. All Irth recognized them as supreme tacticians, and every army coveted their counsel.
But ogres kept wholly to themselves. They despised Charm and preferred to live by the timeless and aboriginal traditions of their ancestors.
Supreme opportunists, they had swarmed into the Reef Isles of Nhat a thousand days earlier, after the wizarduke, Lord Drev, had broken the Bold Ones, who had originated in this knolly land.
Since seizing this swampy coast and all its many islets, they had enslaved the human population to serve as scavengers. They traded valuables dredged from the shallows for what they coveted most: rare dew-wine fermented in the grasslands of Sharna-Bambara.
"Dig dunes!" an ogre shouted and pointed out three scavengers, who immediately dashed off to probe the slip faces that had been scalloped at high tide.
"Drag foreshore!" another ogre yelled and dispatched others to pull their nets through the slimy tide margins.
"Rake shoals!" The order fell upon the workers laboring beside Romut, and they sloshed across the pools, rakes held above their heads for balance.
"You, gnome!" An ogre thrust at him a grin like a grimace. "Net waves! Go!"
Romut dared not hesitate, though the chore assigned him presented the most peril. He seized a bale of net and hauled it into the shallows. The ogres enjoyed sending the shortest scavengers toward the deepest water, into the threat of striker-eels and rip currents.
Under breath, the gnomish man cursed the foul-smelling ogre-lords and marched doggedly toward distant breakers. Unlike the coastline elsewhere on Irth, here among the Reef Isles of Nhat the ocean rose and fell serenely, because over the aeons the world's three largest rivers had silted wide littoral plains. Even so, Romut soon found himself chest deep in water.
Ahead of him, the retreating tide broke in luminous waves and filled the air with spume. Numerous small islands cluttered the horizon. On most of them, ogres dominated other scavengers, and Romut could see occasional glints of starlight off their rakes and net weights.
In a cove of the largest island, a dragon wallowed. Its wings flame-flickered under the night sky. Like lightning, its scaly length flashed as it rolled pleasurably in the surf. Its meat-hook talons flexed against the heavens, and the crystals of its eyes glared from under granite brows.
Without warning, it spun about and heaved toward outer space. Its sharp silhouette smashed against the night's starry heights, and it hovered almost motionless.
Something had frightened it.
Romut gazed around at the foaming water sluicing about him. He searched again for the huge face of green gas. He found nothing unusual, just scavengers turning the slick sand with their long rakes and trawling the shallows while ogres built driftwood fires.
Of course, the familiar scene offered little assurance. A dragon's senses far exceeded all other creatures', and it had sensed something frightening.
Lord Drev... The fear of the wizarduke's revenge returned to Romut. Yet how? How could he have found me? He and all others this side of the Gulf know nothing of my true form. They seek an illusion—if they seek me at all.
When he looked upward again, the dragon had departed.
Romut returned to his work. He dared not give the ogres any excuse to punish him. Only his usefulness as a laborer spared him their sadistic glee. His gnomish strength enabled him to perform the work of two men, and the ogres took advantage of that.
He labored alone at the tide's retreating edge, using his large bare feet and stout legs to resist the undertow and relying on luck to spare him the lethal bite of a striker-eel.
Romut's luck provided both jubilance and terror. It had made his twelve thousand days on Irth possible—and it had delivered him into abject poverty, snatched him from that, and hurled him back again.
He had been born not far from this swampy coast, in a bog where his human mother had been exiled after her rape by a gnome. She had died birthing him, ripped apart by his huge head and with neither midwife nor Charm to save her. That had been the terror of his luck.
And as luck would have it, a scavenger found him strangling on his birth cord and saved him to work the tidal flats. That grim luck owned him for the first ten thousand days of his life. Then, everything changed.
He had forgotten entirely the green mask of mist and the startled dragon when the first horrified bellow sounded from the shore. That cry inspired terror in all who heard it, because it sounded from an ogre.
Perched atop a dune above the strand where the fires blazed, an ominous figure hulked.
Romut could not see it clearly from where he stood in the crashing surf, yet he could tell from the agitati
on among the ogres and the outright panic of the scavengers on the shoreline that whatever had alighted there was terrible.
Awestruck, Romut watched as the ogres collapsed to their knees in utter submission.
Sick with sudden dread, the gnomish man backed deeper into the withdrawing tide and felt the tug of undercurrent loosen his toehold on the sandy bottom. If he surrendered to the sea, he would either be swept away to be devoured by eels or flung, like all the other Bold Ones, into the Gulf—unless his jubilant luck asserted itself and he managed to swim against the tide to one of the many islets.
He chose not to gamble just yet with his life and pulled away from the tide's grip. He wanted to see what broke the aggression of ogres.
Two scavengers came splashing toward him, eager to throw themselves into the ocean. "Cacodemons!" one cried to him hysterically, as in warning.
Cacodemons? Romut puzzled at this. As a child, he had heard fright tales of such creatures, but he knew well enough they were not real.
Amazed, he beheld the two scavengers surrender themselves to the riptide and watched in bewilderment as their bobbing heads and flailing arms dwindled into the horizon.
This display of hopeless struggle against the tide determined him to abandon any thought of swimming to another isle. He lay flat and rode the rushing foam toward the shore.
As he neared, the cacodemons came more clearly into view.
Tall as the ogres, they had reptilian sleekness with stark bones jutting under the husk of their malevolent faces. Violent fangs meshed in their hooked jaws, and—most horrible of all—their bellies carried within them other faces, several on each torso, horrid features displaying clamped grins and many spider eyes.
Seeing this abomination, Romut believed at once he possessed the strength to swim against the legendary current and find sanctuary on one of the reef isles. Quickly, he turned and waded back into the waves. But the cacodemons had already spotted him.
Whimpering, he dove under the waves and pulled himself along the sandy bottom into deeper water. He stayed under until the breath in him burned so hot it began to char his mind.
When at last he burst into the air, he found that he had swum under the wave break and into the implacable grip of the outbound current. He rolled onto his back and gazed shoreward. And what he saw poured cold through his veins: The cacodemons had risen into the night and carried themselves through the air as an abhorrent flock. Black and mute as soot, they glided hard upon him.
With a yelp, he plunged underwater but had no breath to stay. As he came up again, the cacodemons floated directly above, near enough for him to see clearly even in the dark the wet rodent teeth in the creased faces of their underbellies.
He tried to go under again, and talons pierced his vest and hoisted him out of the water. The vest tore, and he plunged again into the sea. An instant later, claws pincered the muscles of his chest, stabbed through his flesh, and hooked under his collarbone. He rose, flaring a scream that withered to squeals as the underbelly faces gnashed their maws to chew at him.
The claws held him just out of the snapping reach of the hungry faces, and his squeals singsonged pain and terror.
Hung like a snatched trout, he gauped at the night land below, spinning away. Marshes with their ragged mists retreated, and the boggy shoreline where he had grown up a slave to the tides and where he had slaved again for the ogres vanished below clouds. By that he knew the cacodemons carried him inland toward the highlands. He assumed there, in some bone-strewn aerie, they would devour him.
A cold laugh shuddered from beyond the wingless demons.
Romut moaned painfully to behold again the green face of mist, smaller, streaking like a comet beside him. Its bald, baleful visage wrinkled with malignant mirth. "Romut, you are taken! Now prepare to meet the Dark Lord! Ready yourself to submit before Hu'dre Vra!"
Romut bawled hysterically. His body bucked and came within reach of the slaverous faces in the ribbed torso of the cacodemon that held him. Rat teeth gnawed at his abdomen, and he jerked away in pain, leaving rags of his flesh in the chewing mouths.
Simpering in terror, Romut hung bleeding from the talons' steely grasp and gazed up into that gnashing visage, crazed to bite into him again.
The gaseous face blurring beside him spun with cruel laughter, then pulled closer and cackled poisonously. "And now, Romut, you will wear death's shadow!"
The talons pulled him upward into the hungry mouth, and those frantic jaws bit deeply into his body. Pain cut mortally. Blood sprayed and gurgled in his throat, stoppering his mad cries, drowning him in his own desperate suffering.
The talons unclasped, and Romut fell.
Spinning blood through the dark air, he plummeted. Entrails unraveled above him. Impact shattered the bone chain of his spine and the plates of his skull, and he lay in a quivering pool of torment, staring up helplessly at circling cacodemons blotting the stars.
Darkness wrinkled closer. Pain chilled colder. Death narrowed in.
At the very brink of oblivion, a huge voice pounded him: "Romut!"
His smashed and ripped body jumped with hotter pain.
"Romut, be whole!"
Suffering blew away like smoke in a stiff wind, and the spilled juices of his body, the smashed porcelain of his bones and torn silk of his flesh fitted together, once again intact.
He sat up effortlessly, his breath clear and easy, vision shiny and new minted. All agony ceased, as though his death throes had been a mere delusion.
The sinister, hulking figure before him wore jagged blades of black armor enameled with star fire. The phantasmagoria of its spiked helmet, cowled like a cobra's hood, fanned out from a viper's grinning visage and a baleen of needle-thin teeth. Deep within its hooded sockets, hot eyes slanted.
"Romut"—a voice of void and darkness spoke—"I am the countenance of death. I am the indifference of life. Hu'dre Vra is my name."
"Oh, great lord!" Romut whimpered.
"Silence!" Hu'dre Vra roared, and the space around him cracked into broken pieces of lightning. "I am full master here. None may speak before me without my sufferance. Now—die!"
Like a bursting pod, Romut's torso split, and his viscera bloomed with smiting pain. Blood smoked into the air around him, coloring the shape of his screams. Blackness touched him hard between the eyes, and he collapsed swathed in the chill coils of death.
"Now rise, Romut." The great voice spoke again. "Rise and be whole once more! The Dark Lord commands!"
Blood smoke swirled tightly around Romut, pouring back into his ruptured body. Lightnings doodled his flesh, stitching his wounds together.
He sat up intact, gazing fearfully at the shining blackness. The serrated and glossy darkness of Hu'dre Vra fixed on him.
With trembling hands, Romut covered his face and cowered before the giant figure.
"Now you see, little person"—Hu'dre Vra's enormous voice spoke—"all life on Irth is at my mercy. By whim alone, I rule."
Romut lay silent and shuddering.
"I can destroy you and restore you a thousand more times," the thunderous voice said. "Hu'dre Vra can find you wherever you go. No place is hidden from the Dark Lord. How do you think I found you in the first place? I know you, Romut—and my magic can find you wherever on Irth you go."
Green gas seeped through Romut's tight fingers and scalded his eyes with a frightful apparition of the mask that had escorted him here.
"Do you understand?" The green mask spoke with its master's voice.
Romut whimpered and nodded his head vigorously.
"Speak!"
"Yes, lord! Yes, I understand. Oh, yes, I understand!"
"Pain is my servant," Hu'dre Vra said. "Look at me, little man."
Romut lifted his woeful face.
The mask of green gas shredded, and the titanic black form stepped closer. "Torment obeys me. Death obeys me. All life is mine to mangle and reshape as I please. Do you believe me, Romut?"
"Yes, lord."
"And will you obey me in all things?"
"Oh, yes, lord."
The serpent grin of the black-lacquered mask seemed to widen. Hu'dre Vra drew an ebony spike from the brassard of his saw-toothed armor. Deftly, he dropped the curved spike into the ground between Romut's knees. "Take it."
Romut grasped the cold metal in shivering hands, and it slid from the ground with a rasping sound.
"Now, Romut—pierce yourself through the heart."
Romut gauped with fright at the stupendous being of darkness.
"Do it!"
Squinting shut his eyes and grimacing so broadly that he showed molars, Romut swung the sharp spike directly at his breast. The spike drove hard into his chest.
Pain flared. Its enormity convulsed him. And every involuntary twist of his body stabbed him yet again. Cut horribly, he wanted only to die. But death would not come. The monstrous presence of the Dark Lord kept him alive and suffering.
The torture lasted an abominable eternity. Madness seethed, and his mind bleared toward the mica glitter of mute mineral matter.
"Be whole!" the Dark Lord commanded.
Instantly, the suffering ended. No stain of it remained.
"You hesitated to pierce your heart," Hu'dre Vra said, "and so I gave you suffering. When next I command, obey at once. Do you understand me, Romut?"
"Yes, yes! I understand, my lord." The gnomish man pressed his bulbous head to the ground and swore, "I will obey you in all things without hesitation."
"Good. Now rise."
Romut flung himself upright.
"Rise!" Hu'dre Vra insisted—and they rose into the night sky.
Vapor trails of stars swirled motionless overhead. The two figures glided down the wind toward shining tide-hammered shallows. Like spindrift, they softly alighted on the shoals. The redolence of sea wrack and algal mats swelled about them with the breathing of the surf.
The Dark Lord swept a gaze across the empty strand. Ogres and other scavengers had vanished into the dunes. "You know well this place, do you not, Romut?"
Romut lowered his head and spoke humbly. "Yes, lord. I have lived here my whole life."
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 7
